December Visitor

I love blogs

I love reading blogs - strangers and people I know

I love getting creative ideas from blogs

I love being a little voyeuristic into other peoples lives

I love reading about travels to places near and far

I love looking at photos on blogs

And this leads me to why I really haven't blogged lately...I have placed such pressure on myself to present fantastic images on my blog that I just stopped blogging.

I don't care when I read other peoples blogs whether they have heavily photoshopped their pics or not, but for some reason I felt pressure to pretty much have frame worthy images on each of my posts. And so because of this pressure, I put on myself, I have sadly neglected to document the experiences our family is enjoying at this moment as we live overseas.

And the other reason is the fact that I get daunted about going through the gazillon photos I take each time we go away or do anything. Man, digital cameras can be a curse!

So starting now I'm going to try and blog more and just limit myself to a few pics each time. Having said that, this post contains a number of pics and it's about an event that occured in November 2011.

After much tooing & froing and a LOT of paperwork Mum made her maiden voyage overseas. We were honoured to be her first stop of her month long trip within the USA.

One of the reasons why she was considering not coming was the fact that South Dakota really isn't a friendly place to visit in winter. Usually snow abounds, blizzards occur and days spent inside staying warm generally happen. I say usually because as luck would have it South Dakota is experiencing a very mild winter (apparently a 1 in 100 year phenomenon). Snow didn't really fall until mid-January and only for a few short interspersed days. At this moment, all our snow will probably be melted away within the next few days!

So you can imagine my frustration and disappointment that Mum's trip of a lifetime would sadly probably not include her first, and possibly only, white Christmas.

In an effort to try and give her an icy experience we headed to Arrowhead Park on one of the days prior to Christmas. It's a wonderful little nature reserve. My favourite part of the park is this beautiful old barn. I'm in love with barns and if we were living here permanently I would buy the old barn that is down the road from us and do it up to live in. It's quite rundown but I have visions of restoring it Grand Designs style and then having Kevin McCloud come and visit me....oh I mean the barn! A girl can dream!

Within the park there are two lakes. The lakes I believe were small quarries at one stage but now are filled with water and are home to geese, ducks, turtles and fish. It was a nice surprise to discover that one of the lakes had frozen over a bit. So, as any good mother would do, I sent the kids out to test the ice and when they didn't plummet through we all ventured onto the ice and skated around at the edge.

Christmas came and went, and with the news that snow had fallen the week before in the Black Hills, we headed to Mt Rushmore in the hope that snow would still be around.

First stop, Wall Drug just because you have to, and then it was onto the Badlands. We got lucky and unlucky here. Unlucky because it was bitterly cold but lucky because there was still a little bit of snow on the ground.

We were only going to be in the Black Hills overnight, and as we had made such good time driving to Rapid City (surprising as I think we stopped at EVERY rest stop) we decided to head straight to Mt Rushmore.

We got to there late in the afternoon so decided we would look around and stay until dark to see the presidents all lite up. As a family we have been to Mt Rushmore a few times but we have never been there in the evening so to see the lights on the mountain was a first for the kids and I.

The next morning we went to Crazyhorse (I didn't take any pics here) and then onto Custer State Park. I loved going back to Custer during the winter. The gorgeous scenery just had a lovely light dusting of snow and the huge lake was completely frozen over.

As we drove up to the lake we noticed people were ice fishing in the middle so we assumed the lake was well and truly frozen over and made our way out onto it. Here we did a little skating (really more like slipping and sliding) and a bit of snow throwing.

Each time we go to Custer the highlight is always to donkeys (they're actually burro's). These guys sure aren't shy and happily crowd the car in the hope of food. And when they're not making their presences known inside the car they're licking the car to death.

The last few days of mum's stay with us was filled with shopping and just hanging out time.

We loved having her with us for those few short weeks.

The kids really loved being able to creep into bed with her in the morning or play Apples to Apples with her.

I love that now when I talk about our daily lives, walking to school or stalking a bargin at TJ Maxx, she'll have a firm mental image of the places I'm talking about.

When mum finally left on the Sunday, she was meant to leave Saturday but with no pilot on her scheduled flight she left the next day, she went onto Arizona and later that day we flew out to Florida.